Yotsuba&! 6 is very, very funny. Easily the best book in the series thus far, if only due to the way the stories end up snowballing into a larger tale. Yotsuba’s trek to Fuuka’s school did an amazing job of capturing just how awesome real life is, which is something Yotsuba&! already does very well.

My problem is with the translation. It’s not to my liking, to be honest, and pales in comparison to the ADV Translation. It’s not that it’s bad, exactly, but it is a little too faithful to the source material.

Part of the beauty of Yotsuba&! is that the source material is very, very strong. The relatively few cultural jokes have easy analogues, as in Miura visits the Ayase household dressed as a cardboard robot. In the ADV translation, she says that her name is Cardbo. That’s pretty easy, right? Cardbo->Cardbord->Cardboard robot. It makes sense.

In the Yen Press translation, Miura calls herself Danbo, a reference to the Japanese word for cardboard. And, okay, that’s cool, but it isn’t a joke, exactly. It’s a reference with a footnote. It’s like when someone tells you a joke, and you don’t laugh because you don’t get it, and then they explain why it was funny. The problem is that after all of that… it still isn’t funny. You get it, but you don’t laugh.

Similar to the Danbo translation is the use of honorifics– chan, san, and so on. While an integral part of Japanese, they don’t really have any place in English. It’s another joke that doesn’t work. There are ways around it, of course– Fuuka-neesan can just be “big sis,” for example. Oftentimes, however, nothing is truly lost by leaving them out. An adult referring to Yotsuba in Japan may say “Yotsuba-chan,” while an American would say “Yotsuba.” Both are equally valid and both read the same. The chan is just a clue for us to go “Oh! She’s talking to a child!”

The sound effects are also left untranslated, for the same reason that I assume the honorifics were left in. Untranslated isn’t exactly right, though. There are little notes next to the first iteration of each sound effect in a group that explains what the sound is. Otherwise, the sfx are untouched.

It’s a little lame and distracting, if I’m being perfectly honest. It’s another case of being too faithful. I’ve been reading manga for a long time. I know that “doki doki” is the sound of a heartbeat, “ora ora ora!” is what people say when they’re punching someone over and over, and that chicks go “piyo piyo!”

The thing is, that sort of thing doesn’t really translate. It tends to just look silly, and yep, in Yotsuba&!’s new translation, it looks silly. When the Japanese sound effects are left in the text, the book ends up looking more like a fan translation rather than a professional work.

Fans are notable for being extremely reluctant to be anything but absolutely faithful to the source material in an attempt to be truly authentic. This often leads to awkward, or nonsensical translations. Yotsuba&! being strong enough to shine through an awkward translation doesn’t make the translation any less awkward. The honorifics don’t add anything to the book, beyond it seeming more “Japanese.” It’s like the book has been translated, but not localized.

Part of the draw of Yotsuba is how it’s fairly minimalist, to borrow an idea from Jeff Lester. His specific example was toward the end of Yotsuba & Delivering, when Koiwai bonks Yotsuba on the head for bicycling so far away from home. It’s a completely white panel with Koiwai, his fist bonking Yotsuba on her gigantic head, the sound effect in kana, the romanization of the sound effect (“go”), and “bonk” in parentheses.

In the original Japanese, it’s a very simple and to the point panel. However, in Yen Press’s translation, it’s got the romanization and the actual translation on top of the kana, which just clutters things up. It takes away from the minimalist style of the panel. The problem is that editing out the kana and simply inserting a “bonk” sound effect in an appropriate style would’ve been much more straightforward and, well, funny. The panel has two bits: Koiwai bonking Yotsuba and the “bonk” sound. Instead, it has the bonking action, a symbol that’s essentially meaningless to me, the translation of that symbol, and then the actual sound effect. It’s too much. It weakens the joke by layering on too much information.

My favorite translation, bar none, is the Geneon Lupin the Third dub. It took an old series that would not have benefitted very much from a direct translation (judging by the original Monkey Punch manga I used to own), looked at the characters and their personalities, and crafted new lines and jokes based on that. The characters never felt out of character or inappropriate, and the jokes were actually funny, rather than just being references to Japanese pop culture. This is an extreme example, of course, but it shows how this kind of thing can work.

It’s similar to how ADV approached their Yotsuba&! translation. Certain things won’t translate seamlessly, but rather than compromise a very funny book by making it less funny, they bent the rules a little and kept the book’s spirit, if not its letter.

I totally understand why Yen Press’s translation is the way it is. JuYoun Lee, Senior Editor at Yen Press, gave an illuminating interview with Deb Aoki over the translation. I don’t agree with the way they chose to go, but it makes sense from a certain angle. It’s more accurate and exact, but I don’t think that that is a universally good thing. It leads to too many jokes ending up explained, rather than allowed to breathe, distracting gremlins ending up on the page, and having to qualify my love for the series when recommending it to people.

At one point during Yotsuba&! 6, Koiwai says, “I love the way she reacts to stuff like this.” That sums up the entire series. It’s got a strong dose of humor, wonder, and love. The source material is some of the best out. Yotsuba&! is a very, very good series, but certain aspects of the translation are disappointing. That isn’t a dealbreaker, but I wish it were a little better. It deserves it.

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35 comments to “Yotsuba & Translation Issues”

I just started reading my copy last night and I have to agree with you. The simplicity of Yotsuba, and even Azumanga Daioh, is what appeals the most. The logic behind the more direct translation does make sense, and I know tons of fanboys are probably going “HUZZAH IT SAYS FUUKA NEE CHAN :3” but I don’t need it.

But now I have hope that Yen Press here will bring out the Azumanga Daioh anniversary edition with giraffe cosplay Tomo action.

Sidenote, how is it three of the most manliest, hardcore men in the country (you me`n`Larry stuntman extraordinaire) can love this so much.

I also agree– my wife and I both noticed it. For us it was a strange feeling of the general tone, that it didn’t quite feel as clean, well handled and child-like as the previous translations had been. Mind you we still loved it, but not as much as we had ADV volumes.

Given your comments here, David, I’m vaguely curious what you’d make of Keith Giffen’s work on the English-language Battle Vixens. With his translations of Battle Vixens and Battle Royale, Giffen is either practicing an admirable form of cultural appropriation upon the source manga, or he’s working through his issues with women.

I used to be really into Japanese comics, but got out when the smaller companies started pushing literally-translated and ‘non-flipped’ tpbs with the elitist and inherently flawed idea of ‘authenticity’ ahead of storytelling, but your beefs above pretty much all stem from bad editorial oversight, poor proofing, or keeping costs down by not redrawing elements of the art (SFX).

I have to admit, reading vol. 6, it does seem cluttered. But now I’m used to it, and I expect smooth sailing from here on out. As for ADV, their typos and misnaming the characters in Vols. 2 and 3 soured me to no end, so i will take Yen
Press every day of the week.

You know, the dedication manga fans have for keeping things 100% accurate actually kind of made me think of the sort of things that keep outside people from wanting to read American comics as well. The obsessive love of continuity and tie-ins, over-the-top violence, etc. etc. Those things definitely have their place but, well, the level they’re at right now just kind of chases off the newer customers – you know, the kind that would bring extra money to the market. Manga, likewise, would probably benefit if it didn’t seem like such an incestuous fandom, and tried to appeal to more people who aren’t already obsessed with Japanese culture.

Check this link out. It shows a documentry on fan-subbing and is very insightful about how translations can go horribly, horribly wrong. It may not be about Manga, but the same translation issues you’re suggesting is exactly the same.

Jezz, I wanted to try Yotsuba – but not if the series is this badly translated. I remember how they botched Osaka’s diologe, in Azumanga Daioh, by giving her a rough brooklyn accent. I felt very luck they fixed it, and made the diologe more accurately that of a bumpkin, in the over-sized edition. The single volumes of the manga, though, remain that way.

You raise some great points, David! I have the same issues with translations; there’s no way to perfectly map Japanese onto English, so why not strive for something that captures the tone and spirit of the original, rather than its most literal meaning? Manga publishers used to employ script doctors all the time to make the work punchier and more idiomatic in English. I have no idea how Flowers and Bees reads in the original Japanese, but I have no doubt that the English re-write helped make Moyocco Anno’s sharp satire a lot funnier for American readers.

There is something to be said for a product that is faithfully translated, and while I haven’t yet gotten my hands on the Yen Press re-translations, there were enough problems with ADV’s translations due to poor editorial-oversight that really irritated me.

I have no problem with a retranslation that’s a bit more literal, if it can still manage to transmit the humor of Yotsuba&! – if things start getting lost in the cracks, then that’s a different story.

I get what you’re saying, although I personally disagree. But that’s not why I’m writing. I specifically want to address the issue of sound effects – from the publisher’s perspective.

There are three camps of “how to tackle sound effects.”

1) Leave the original kana in place and just translate it next to the characters

2) Leave the original kana in place and translate it in the margins

3) Replace the original kana with an English language equivalent.

Camps 1 and 2 are similar, but not the same. Before I deal with them, let me jump forward to 3, which is what you are asking for.

“Retouch and lettering” are one of the steps that take the longest in creating a translated manga.

In order to replace a sound effect in Japanese (which are often part of the background art – not a separate layer) it can be as simple as wiping away a word on a white background and replacing it with a word on a white background. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case, and often replacing a sound effect in Japanese means wiping away a hand-drawn sound effect (not a font…hand-drawn) on a screentone background, and tortuously rebuilding that tone, since we rarely have the equivalent sitting around here in the US. Then, we can replace the sound effect with an analogous one in English.

In the case of most of the ALC Publishing books, I do the sound effects myself and I am not kidding when I tell you that the most complex panel I ever worked on took me 3 days to recreate. Panel, not page. It looks so awesome that I guarantee you will never realize how much work it took, but I am *never* going to do that again. :-)

If I had a longer series to publish, with a lot of sound effects, I’d go the 1) route. Not because I want to screw with you, the reader, but because it simply takes too long to replace sound effects with English language equivalents.

I’d also like to say that I do not notice sound effects at all, when I read comics. Not in American comics or manga. Other people do, but I find it incomprehensible to not know that “REALLY BIG LETTERS/CHARACTERS” mean some loud noise and doors go “click” when being closed petulantly and “slam!” when being closed with anger. However, I realize I am alone in this. So I do my best to handle the sound effects with precision in our books. Nonetheless, I completely sympathize with publishers who just don’t have the time.

As for Camp 2…. It’s hard to know if a story will have enough room between the margins, and I prefer footnotes to endnotes in my stories, so I tend to use the margins for things that must be explained.

***

Your commentary is very valid, but from my experience with fandom, it’s also somewhat in the minority. Most fans prefer their manga to replicate the feeling and sense of the Japanese original as much as possible, so they get an “authentic” experience. Honorific is more than just an indication of speaking to a child or not…it is an indication of relationship of one person to another.

There’s a lot of personal preference in reading and experiencing manga – the kind of localization you prefer is exactly what a lot of people dislike, and the poor publisher has to steer the craft between Scylla and Charybdis of competing expectations.

I will most certainly be buying this based on your review. Even if I don’t laugh at a joke that had to be explained to me this time, I will the next time it appears. After all, we only “get” any joke because we learn. ^_~

@Kandou Erik: I don’t mean to bury Yotsuba&!, as it is still a very, very funny comic. There’s a joke in volume 4 where Fuuka is depressed over a boy and Yotsuba is trying to cheer her up. It’s one of the best bits, and it’s still laugh out loud funny. Yotsuba&! is good, I just feel it has the potential to be better than it is.

I didn’t know they corrected Osaka’s dialogue in the omnibus. That’s fascinating.

@AlLoggins: You know, I bought like three volumes of Battle Vixens and Battle Royale when it seemed like eight new manga came out a week, but I’d be hard-pressed to remember what I thought of the translation. I think I still have Battle Vixens around here– I’ll check it out once I find it and try to report back. Battle Royale, though, you’re on your own. It was a little too gross for me. Kids killing kids was a little much.

@george: Who did ADV mis-name? I lent my ADV volumes (1-3, 5) to a friend, so I can’t check. I know they went with Fuka instead of Fuuka, and Cardbo instead of Danbo. Did they mis-name Torako/Tiger?

@Jordan: You know, I’d never thought of it like that. That’s a really fascinating line of thought, and I can certainly see how it tracks- being too faithful makes it seem very fannish and intimidating. It’s definitely worth thinking about. I remember fighting (or seeing people fight) about subs vs dubs in anime way back when, with similar points made.

@Katherine Dacey: Yes! I think it’s wonderful that manga is from Japan, and having a window into Japanese culture is nice, but translated manga is published for American audiences. A little bit of adaptation, rather than literal translation, can go a very, very long way. I can understand it in something like Sayonara, Zetsubo-sensei, which is so distinctly and enthusiastically Japanese in every way, shape, and form, but I also agree with a friend’s assessment that it was a funny book where you don’t really laugh all that much due to the overwhelming feeling of looking in on a funny thing. I loved the little girl who sent poison emails (that was an honest laugh out loud), but most of it was a kind of “Heh, I get that” thing. Of course, there’s a market for it, and more power to them.

@David: I wasn’t voicing approval of Battle Vixens or Battle Royale, they were simply the most extreme examples of ‘westernised’ manga that occurred to me, and probably worthy of appraisal in any discussion of how far is too far for localisation of a foreign work.

@AlLoggins: I actually found my volumes in a box this morning. I bought three of them, so I must’ve liked it at least on some level. I’ll reread tonight and comment again, or maybe do a post if it’s a big deal.

I can’t believe I own three volumes of a series called “Battle Vixens.” I don’t think I prefer Ikkitousen, though sounds much classier, but Battle Vixens just sounds… porny.

I guess 13 year old me would be proud, and pull the smug Yotsuba Opening the Door at the Supermarket “Heh heh,” to stay on topic.

@David: I didn’t mean that the series misnamed the characters, sorry if you got that impression. I meant, instead, that when translating they called the characters by their wrong names from time to time. For example, on the last
page of vol.3 of the ADV edition, Yotsuba is sitting watching the fireworks, and says something like ‘Fuka! Asagi! you’re watching the fireworks!’ But Yotsuba is talking to Ena and Miura. Not an earth-shattering mistake, but the ADV
editions tended to be littered with them…

I agree. I commented on this myself. Having a footnote and an overlay to every translation in every panel means you don’t read the story as a whole, in a smooth motion. It means you stop and go, “Oh. More text…” read that, and then break the rhythm of the joke. I always lol when reading Yotsuba&! but I didn’t once with this volume, stuck in all the unnecessary text junk. Put that stuff in the back!

Very interesting. I kinda feel for the person/people who did the Yen Press translation: translating fiction is immensely difficult, especially between very different cultures and (in this case) acual writing systems. I totally see what you’re saying about them not doing as good a job as they should, but still…

All translation, I think, is an exercise in making compromises. What I believe is that the translator has to (1.) make the work accessible to the new audience, (2.) remain true to the spirit of the original work, and (3.) lose as little as possible of the original work.

Doing all three of these things is virtually impossible, especially when working across large cultural divides, as is the case here (I imagine Japan/America is probably much harder than, say, France/America). The Yen Press translators sacrificed accessibility in favor of retaining a larger amount of the original work, and thus also dilluted the spirit of the work (when it comes to the reading experience at any rate).

The Yen Press translators were faced with a difficult task, and did a bad job in being too faithful. Perhaps their mission was doomed from the beginning. After all, the only way to create a truly faithful translation of a text is not to translate it at all. All else is compromise.

The first story in volume 6 is worse than most scanlations I’ve read. It’s so amateur hour, from the honorifics to changing Cardbo’s name to the footnotes…God, there are footnotes for each panel featuring that “15 year old” t-shirt! When I finished reading it I was so steamed that I fully intended to write Yen Press a letter. An angry one! I’ve never done that before. And I haven’t done it yet, cuz I read further and calmed down a bit. The later chapters aren’t as bad. But they’re still nowhere near as good as the ADV volumes.

The new font sucks too.

And yeah, Jordan has a good point. I think a lot of publishers spend too much time online and are too concerned with pleasing the hardcore nuts. I know a few kids that love Yotsuba. This new translation style probably won’t spoil things for them, but I do think it might lessen their enjoyment. 8 year olds shouldn’t have to deal with honorifics.

I’m quite happy for manga to get the full, high-budget localisation treatment. Replacing sound effects is an obvious one, but should only be attempted by publishers willing to pay for a decent photoshop job. :P

I’ve noticed that a lot of avid (English-language) manga consumers here in Sydney (going by the demographic that lurks around the shelves) are expat or second-generation-imigrant Japanese – it’s entirely possible that they’re still in it for the cultural connection.

On the topic of dubs, I’m inflexible: I won’t have that crap on in the same room as me. Forget loyalty to the source or elitism – I just break out in hives when I hear the voice acting! I find American accents grating at the best of times, and the hyper-earnest whine of the usual anime dubber suspects seems custom-made to drive me into a homicidal rage.

(I’ve been told it’s a San Diego accent, though I’ve never found anything to back that up. I ran into someone with the same accent using voice chat in Guild Wars once – nice guy, polite and friendly, but I instantly wanted to reach through the interwebs and strangle him! He must have wondered why I was being so terse…)

There’s an unmistakable uniform level of quality with dubs, and while there does seem to be a limited pool of voice talent utilised in the west, I think it’s not unreasonable to assume that there’d be a bit of variety in the style of delivery or tone by dint of statistical probability alone, making me believe that the monotone, lifeless standard of the anime dub is – like the reverse-printed, literally-translated, annotated, low-quality paper and rarely-proofed translations of manga – the product of deliberate direction to appeal to a narrow corridor of fans.

And then there’s the English translations of the songs: Jesus. I heard the English-language version of Fields of Hope when I accidentally sat on my dvd remote and it made me stop buying Gundam Seed without a moment’s hesitation.

I didn’t like the new font, but other than that I thought it was fine. The tone shifted, but when you’re using a different translator that’s bound to happen. (I kept hearing Taokaka’s english voice in my head fo Yotsuba early on for some reason. )

And as a longtime manga reader I’m going to have to disagree with the choir on this one. Accuracy > localization. Many if not most of the series that come over these days aren’t yet complete. That sets up situations where the localization conflicts with elements introduced later in the story, or seemingly throwaway lines get changed that play an important role in the story later.

That being said, a bad translation is a bad translation.

@AlLoggins
It wasn’t authenticity that drove the push for non-flipped manga. It was just a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. Once they realized that people were willing to read them that way they were able to save time, effort, and money; many of the smaller manga presses would have died out already if not for that.

Before, a volume of Ranma 1/2 cost $16. When they stopped flipping and and standardized a smaller book size it dropped to $10. Over 1/3 of the price knocked off and they were able to push the books out faster and on a more regular basis.

@ Jordan
“Manga, likewise, would probably benefit if it didn’t seem like such an incestuous fandom, and tried to appeal to more people who aren’t already obsessed with Japanese culture.”

I realize your statement was hyperbole but I still find it utterly insulting. And inaccurate, unless there was a large Japanophile movement going on in the ranks of the young and the female before manga blew up.

Maybe I’m missing something but I can’t understand why so many people in this thread are so gung-ho about Americanizing these books. Do we really need to wash the Japanese culture out of the Japanese comic books to appeal to people too lazy to learn the difference between -san and -chan?

@Onion: It isn’t about washing anything out of anything. My point, and I think the point of a few people posting here, is that if you’re going to adapt a book for an American audience, you should adapt it, not just transplant it. That makes for a poor reading experience. Absolutely no one is advocating a scorched earth approach to all books. Gunsmith Cats, being set in Chicago, has a very thorough localization and it works. Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei is very, very Japanese, so the light pass was probably a better choice. Yotsuba&!, in particular, would benefit from a stronger hand. That’s all anyone is saying, other than the (accidental) dub vs sub talk upthread.

As far as the honorifics, it’s not laziness at all. When I first read Frank Miller’s 300, it was in Spanish. The laughter and grunts and such were translated to their appropriate Spanish equivalents, because “huh?” isn’t standard Spanish. It was something that simply doesn’t translate. At the same time, when I read translated Jordi Bernet comics, the masculine and feminine forms of various Spanish words are adapted into English. These are things that matter very much in Spanish, but are, for all intents and purposes, meaningless in English. Same with -san and -chan- I know what they mean, I know why they’re used, they just do not have an easy analog.

And speaking as a dude who has been dipping in and out of anime/manga-based sites for about as long as I’ve had the internet… the fandom is very much obsessed and incestuous. Fans and publishers alike have pushed this idea of “authentic” manga, Tokyopop being a particularly egregious proponent of it, for years. That means as Japanese, or as Japanese as an outsider looking in can get, as possible, with deviation from the accepted standards being a terrible idea, untrue to the original work. You can even see it in the dub vs sub argument that’s been had several thousand times ever since the internet was invented.

One Piece scanslators/fansubbers are bound and determined to leave “nakama” in the One Piece manga. It’s a Japanese word that translates, essentially, to comrade or crewmate. I can’t think of a single reason for that to stay in, beyond a misguided push for accuracy, but it has and many people are adamant about it. It’s silly. It’s like being the guy determined to call shows by their Japanese names, who wants to talk all about Shin Seiki Evangelion and Jubei Ninpocho.

@Erica Friedman: Hi Erica! For some reason, your comment got caught in my spam filter and I just noticed it now. Sorry about that, because you have some valuable insight.

I don’t mind the sound effects in the margins/on the art approach. In something like Monster, Lone Wolf & Cub (which I should really get back to writing about…), or Blade of the Immortal, the kana is so integrated with the art that it becomes linework, rather than lettering, and part of the composition. I just feel that the kana + romanization + translation, and then multiple times in one panel for the same sfx, is overkill.

One of my favorite American letterers is John Workman, a guy who worked on Walt Simonson’s Thor, among other (excellent) titles. The way he did sound effects made me start really paying attention to their usage in comics, both in terms of style and effect. They were a part of the art, and rather than just being a generic “KABOOM!” or over-the-top “KABLAMMO!” or something, they looked like they belonged on the page. I guess it’s like if you read a book by a writer who does great dialogue, and then one by a writer who just does normal dialogue, and you’re left feeling like, “Hey, wait, what’s wrong with this? This doesn’t feel right.”

@david: While I agree with your comments for the most part, I’d like to point out something about the word “nakama”. While, yes, it does mean crewmate or comrade, it can also mean friends, partners, and even family (what I feel the Straw Hat Crew is, personally). Nakama is a very important shounen trope (it’s one of the sources of hot-bloodedness, imo), and, since the meaning can’t be translated to one simple English word, scanlators/fansubers don’t translate it.

I don’t personally have a problem with leaving the art unflipped. I always found it easy to adapt to, and if it saves money, and as I recall hearing, the artists dislike having their work flipped, then they may as well leave it unflipped.

@Onion: I never doubted that cost pushed the move into non-flipped pages, my objection – as a manga reader beginning in the mid-80s with Lone Wolf and continuing for the better part of two decades until the current standards turned me off – stems from the ‘authenticity’ claim that’s been pushed as the motivating factor instead of ‘cost’. Companies nurtured an incestuous mentality around the material that ultimately overtook the need to create accessible works, and the low quality of western translations and/or proofing is a symptom of that.
I could deal with the flipped pages and the elitism, but when the proofing is so poor it gets in the way of reading and enjoying the story it’s time to call it quits, which I did.

Apologies for the dubbing derailment, too. That’s a whole other bugbear.

[…] Thorn discusses manga translation and man, I pretty much agree with him. I’ve had my issues with overly faithful translations, and he does a pretty good job of explaining why. I think approaching a translation project as […]

[…] out the new ones; Yen’s new translations, which are more literal than ADVs, have caused some discussion, but that just keeps people talking. They also brought out an omnibus edition of Azumanga Daioh, by […]

does anything satisfy you? you pieces of shit
were just glad that Yen Press is continuing with Yotsuba&!.
“aww, translation differences from ADV? I know lets make an artical bashing Yen Press for their attempt to satisfy otakus”
I have both versions and I thought Yen Press did a better job at it.

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